Latest Blog Posts

In a recent performance on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, Cee-Lo Green stripped-down – and arguably improved – King of Leon’s latest single “Radioactive”, rendering the Followill boy’s stadium-ready sing along into a retro-soul jam. Cee-Lo’s third studio album, The Lady Killer, was released in the UK on 8 November 2010, and is out today, 9 November 2010, in the US.

“Iggy was scary,” the Stooges former manager Danny Fields told music critic Robert Palmer while recalling the early live performances of the punk-rock precursor. “I was terrified every time he went onstage that he would cause death and/or mayhem, that he would smash someone over the head with a bench, say, or eviscerate himself onstage. It was very, very powerful; I never saw anything like it.”

Yet despite the infamous lore surrounding Iggy Pop’s initial stint with the Stooges—particularly following the release of their 1970 masterwork Fun House—quality recordings of the band’s onstage mayhem has been an abysmal state of affairs.

Thankfully, Rhino Handmade is set to unveil Have Some Fun: Live at Ungano’s, an unreleased reel-to-reel tape recording of a Stooges’s show during their four-night residency at the Ungano’s nightclub in New York City. Recorded just after the release of Fun House, the band performs every cut from the classic album except “L.A. Blues”, and it is also contains a previously unreleased “10-minute-plus psychedelic, freak out jam” titled “Have Some Fun/My Dream Is Dead”.

According to the release’s linear notes composed by the Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye, “the sound [on the live album] comes in sheets of earsplitting noise, dense and bleating, as if a sheep is being led to slaughter. You can literally hear the ‘60s gasping for breath, the totemic sacrifice of the Stooges.”

The artist that Rolling Stone magazine named a top ten artist to watch is reminding everyone how he earned that title. Pete Yorn is launching a North American tour that will support his new self titled album. The new album has received rave reviews from publications like Spin who said “From bracing opener ‘Precious Stone’ to the chugging fan appreciation ‘Rock Crowd’ to a heartfelt version of Gram Parsons’ ‘Wheels,’ Yorn emerges with his most purposeful, affecting album yet.” The CD is available now and tickets for his tour go on sale this weekend. The tour kicks off on February 14th in Phoenix, but until then, check out some live Pete Yorn below and on thelivebuzz.com.

The Decemberists have just released information on their follow-up to 2009’s excellent The Hazards of Love. Their new album, The King Is Dead is set for a January 18, 2011 release and it features guest appearances by Peter Buck and Gillian Welch on several of the songs.

SONG LIST
01 Don’t Carry It All
02 Calamity Song
03 Rise to Me
04 Rox in the Box
05 January Hymn
06 Down by the Water
07 All Arise!
08 June Hymn
09 This Is Why We Fight
10 Dear Avery